The Willow Glen Resident

Photograph by Skye Dunlap

Big Spenders: The state budget has an extra $1.2 billion this year, Byron Sher said at a March 14 meeting. The crowd shared ideas on how to spend the money.

Sher takes on HMOs, year 2000 at meeting

By Rebecca Wallace

At his first town hall meeting in Willow Glen, state Sen. Byron Sher fielded questions on hot topics from HMOs to MTBe. But the issues sparking the most emotion in the Willows Senior Center on March 14 related to immigration.

Before Sher arrived, two women got into a near-spat over whether bilingual education was the best way to teach English to new residents. The altercation was broken up by Assistant Santa Clara County Sheriff Ruben Diaz, who jumped in and stuck out his hand to shake. "I'm running for sheriff," he said. "You're who?" asked one of the women, unimpressed.

The meeting ended with a man shouting, "They cost us money!" when the subject of illegal immigrants was broached.

Sher, a friendly bearded man with a thoughtful air that reflects his experience as a Stanford University law professor, took it all in stride. To a woman's question, "Why can't we stop illegal aliens coming in?" he gave a careful response.

"There is an effort to close the borders," he said, "but we need to draw a distinction between legal and illegal aliens."

And bilingual education remains controversial, with the English for the Children initiative, which seeks to ban bilingual education in public schools, heading for the June ballot, he said.

This was Sher's third town hall meeting of the day after meetings in Cupertino and Los Gatos. His district covers the southern half of Willow Glen.

Sher said the state's $7.5 billion budget contains about $1.2 billion more than had been anticipated. And the approximately 25 people listening had lots of ideas for how the extra money could be spent.

Robert Jaffee, a senator to the state senior legislature, thanked Sher for voting to override Gov. Pete Wilson's veto of a package of bills aiming to reform HMOs, even though the override was unsuccessful. But he asked, "How do we get the state legislature to value human life over politics?"

"I do think members of the legislature value health care," Sher responded, citing the large number of health-care bills that have been introduced. He mentioned a bill that he was working on, which would allow patients to keep their own doctor if the doctor was terminated by a medical group for reasons not involving quality of care.

Louise Novak of San Jose asked why the state was taking so long to remove MTBe, an additive to gasoline, from the state's drinking water.

A few years ago, after the federal government called upon states to do more to reduce gasoline emissions into the air, the California Air Resources Board decided that an oxygenate should be added to gasoline to make it burn more cleanly, Sher said. The MTBe helped the air, but if the gasoline leaks it can pollute water.

A study is being conducted in hopes of setting an acceptable level of how much of the oxygenate can be safely released into water, Sher said.

Most people seemed satisfied with Sher's responses, but the $64,000 question appeared to be how to solve the sticky "year 2000 problem."

"When you input a year, the computer looks at the last two digits, and will view the year 2000 as 00 and think it's 1900," said Mike Potter from Sher's San Jose office. For example, a computer may think a credit card that expires in 2000 was set to expire in 1900, he said.

Sher said that, on a scale of 1 to 10, he was "4-to-5 confident" that the state would be able to resolve the problem in time. A study was inconclusive, and the private sector is also struggling with the problem.

"That isn't good enough," a man said.

"No, it isn't," Sher agreed. "I'm going to do my best to prod whoever I can." State government will be greatly affected because it has many old computers, and few people know how to reprogram them, he said.

"It's a great time to be a programmer who understands the older [computer] languages," Sher said.

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